Comments on: Bearish wisdom!http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/07/bearish-wisdom/
Wed, 04 Dec 2013 06:45:00 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.14By: Brian Schmidthttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/07/bearish-wisdom/#comment-34642
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 23:00:42 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/?p=12809#comment-34642If by affecting “conservation status” Razib means “legal conservation status”, the answer would be not really, at least not in the US. As I’ve mentioned before, the US Endangered Species Act protects not only species but subspecies and “distinct population segments” (DPS) of vertebrates in order to preserve genetic diversity, and apparently in prejudice against invertebrates.

A citation, although they’re easy to find:

“Under the original ESA, a species was defined to
include ‘‘any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants
and any other group of fish or wildlife of the same
species or smaller taxa in common spatial arrangement that interbreed when mature’’ (ESA, Section
3(15)). In 1978, the Act was amended to eliminate
this language and replace it with the current DPS
concept. The new definition provides that a species
includes ‘‘any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants,
and any distinct population segment of any species
of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when
mature’’ (ESA, Section 4)”

The Terrestrial Vertebrates category is divided in two: Amphibians and Reptilomorpha, which is surely a category you can describe as “reptiles” in the broad sense.

Reptilomorpha divides in several extinct groups and then Amniota.

Amniota divides between Synapsida (mammals and extinct “reptile-like” relatives) and Reptilia (reptiles in the narrow sense, including birds and dinosaurs).

Reptilia divides in Anapsida (leading to Testudina: turtles) and Romerida (leading to Diapsida, which includes all other reptiles and, of course, birds and dinosaurs).

It is not that Reptilia or Reptilomorpha are not monophyletic, it is just that traditionally we decided that a widespread subclade was out of the group (birds and mammals respectively).

Similarly brown bears are monophyletic in the graphic above, if anything it is polar bears, a subclade of brown bears it seems, which are not.

]]>By: Dallashttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/07/bearish-wisdom/#comment-34640
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:36:39 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/?p=12809#comment-34640I had the same feeling as you, Razib, when I first saw the press on this story, and I’ve seen it elsewhere. I’m currently working in a crocodilian systematics lab and one of our Ph.D. students recently published a paper on hybridization between Cuban crocs and American crocs living in Cuba (I believe you linked to this on here before). It got a reasonable amount of press and many of the news stories said the Cuban and American crocs in Cuba are now more closely related to each other than the American crocs in Cuba are to American crocs on the mainland. Only a few of them mentioned this was only in the mitochondrial DNA. I guess its semi-understandable, most people have no understanding of mitochondrial vs genomic inheritance, but it becomes disingenuous when its phrased that way, because it implies something so incredibly and drastically different. I think it aligns with something Jon Stewart is always talking about: the media is all about sensationalism and whatever sounds more dramatic and news worthy is better to publish, whether its true or not. And then there’s the possibility that the journalists in question are just don’t know enough to recognize the distinction.
]]>By: Razib Khanhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/07/bearish-wisdom/#comment-34639
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:24:10 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/?p=12809#comment-34639thanks for the catches guys!
]]>By: pconroyhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/07/bearish-wisdom/#comment-34638
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 15:34:48 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/?p=12809#comment-34638Sandgroper,

Wikipedia sites recent paper in PNAS that says: “the specimen was estimated to be 130–110 ky old, which is significantly older than any other known polar bear subfossils”. The paper itself suggest the split at around 150 kya.